Victoria Garnons-Williams

abundant sufficiency

How many attendants, security guards, peons, or size of entourage are required to let us know that a very important man is coming? One or two? Or flanked by six, wonderfully regimented? And while we understand the serious implications of such important figures, we are invited to be amused at the pomposity of such “stuffed shirts”… or ties, for that matter.

In trying to reveal what I understand of the artist’s processes, I consider the materials and objects and processes as a visual language that has been developed over a lifetime of practice, started young; nuances and permutations of meaning are folded in or perhaps unfolded as the work progresses. Sandy Kirby has described Mona’s practice as “complex work, both symbolically and physically” and in teasing apart the symbols and materials, they inspire a way of looking and understanding Mona’s art that is as intriguing as the work itself.

For example, corporate becomes corporeal… metaphors abound in the use of ties, shirts, collars and shoes. How many ties? Some? ‘Some’ is hardly enough to show us the generalised and de-humanised condition that results from insidiously large organisations that dominate global excesses, nor the government policies that overwhelm, modify and subjugate individual well-being. Four dozen, then… individual in detail, similar enough en masse. Wonderfully phallic, some snake-like and some semi-erect, and all silken with sensuality.

The difference between 7 sets of shoes and four dozen ties is important. It is the number exactly sufficient for import and meaning. Any more shoes, and the irony of power and self-importance would be lost; any fewer ties, and the spectre of power, wavering individualism and testosterone would, too. “These players are so enmeshed in the running of the organisation, they can be thought of as the skin of the firm and the corporate role ultimately takes over their own skin.” (Mona Ryder, Corporate Body, artist statement, 2005.)

Sustaining a Hypothesis

Mona’s creative methods, how she develops her ideas and material research within and during her creation of a body of work is a fluid and yet coherent process. Her ability to sustain a hypothesis by expanding the possibilities of both idea and material are remarkable. In Stretched Grip, 2002, more than two dozen stockings, ‘female’ avatars, are stretched and suspended on hangers in the air, like so many lines of washing. Colanders (bellies) and whisks, pegs, bits of fur and fringe, stretch the stockings one way and the gravitational pull (of weights) stretches in another. The spectacle is both funny and tragic. Again, the individual is apparent in the differences of size and shape, the variations in colour due to the hand-dyed process, the paraphernalia that pokes out or pinches, but the generalised condition is insisted upon by the collective. Still, the richness of each element in each piece is worthy of contemplation, with subtle variations invented as the work is created. The attention to such detail in the overall number of pieces is what satisfies both the idea and the senses without overstatement, or coming across as condescending.

The abundant use of stockings as a corporeal female is given a radically different treatment, one of coalescing, in Sufferance, 2005. The symbolic curtain of a polling (voting) booth is both voluptuous and long… it represents the struggle of women, not as individuals, but as one, for the right to vote. Literally, to be counted. How many stockings?? How cumbersome a skirt?? To what end?? The weight and configuration of this writhing mass is full of gravitas as it spreads across the bench and floor. The curtain/garment does not hang neatly in its place, but extends and expands. How far? Enough to provoke us to an understanding that this journey has been a long one. What the viewer experiences is an exact moment of destiny, but the potential of female political power, left open-ended in this spreading raiment, suggests an intrepid infiltration.

The extending curtains, the spreading skirts found in many of Mona’s works, by their scale, command attention, but this attention to scale also causes the pieces to become strangely alive and animated within the space. Instead of the viewer looking just inward at details from where the work ‘ends’ at its edges, the pieces nudge our attention outwards and add another part of the narrative, pushing conceptual as well as physical boundaries that are crucial in understanding Mona’s messages.

Lone Star, 2019, which was an overview exhibition of some aspects of her practice, reveals a similar concept of extending boundaries in a brilliant act of staging. The use of the street front window through a huge set of curtains, similar in scale to those in the old cinemas, to enter into the work from outside or outwards from inside, both conceptually and visually, takes the show beyond the gallery. From within the relatively small space, instead of feeling claustrophobic, we experience a sense of expansion, with a culminating effect of scale added by each individual work.

The window curtains reach purposefully for the chair skirt, like tongues, and the central section of the installation continues the long, red line down the length of the room, extending and stretching the material point. The skirt itself is of extravagant proportions, the train suggestive of grandness, of singularity, of achievement.

The way that the materials flow through the space is both luxurious and ample. Any more would be superfluous. Awkward. Congested.

Red

The universal inclusion of this signature colour in Mona’s work over decades encompasses a profusion of sensations that are creatively present in the mind of the artist. Each use is an opportunity to express something (or a number of things simultaneously) when translated into aesthetic experience. In my descriptions of Lone Star, red is a tongue, a flowing river, a provocative garment, a sign of nobility. The richness of a single element that translates well into many meanings becomes part of the language of the process. When considering the process, the selection of red is modified by object and arrangement, so not all the references are employed. However, in the mind of the artist, the entire dictionary is available:

“Red screams, cries, yells, blasphemes, and stomps its feet for attention. It says, no more, or dances and flows across life’s stage shrieking with delight. Red pulsates and postulates. It pushes and plays within its folds and holds the curtain to its extreme, until its colour fades.

… How violent and alluring red can be. It sucks you in with its heat. It envelops you.

…It’s fluid too. Running, running over, under and through… making configurations, patterns and designs, it pushes itself to the surface, conspiring with the flesh.

… Red endows fear.

… Red has passive moments. It mutates. It changes intensity with its mood. At times it becomes as luminous as the soul, creating a tranquil island that floats effortlessly over raging seas.” (Mona Ryder, Rawhide, Murmurs, 2004)

When present, red is one element of meaning that overlays whatever else is going on in the pieces. The abundance of possible messages makes the control over such a dominant colour challenging. The subtle variations of hand-dying, careful selection (in fact, Mona had a monopoly on the available red silk ties in Sydney for Les Animaux Savauges) and balancing the proportion of red in any given installation tempers its effect and directs the messages we experience.

Microcosms and Antithesis

Mona’s process also involves a deep sensitivity and understanding of object. Not merely object as a figurative element, but of embedded meaning and metaphor, of emotion and experience. From this basis, Mona drills down creatively, extrapolates, taking every aspect of objects’ potential into consideration. For example, Loose Tongues. The tongue as an object is both strange and slightly repulsive, with a history in medieval punishment and celebrity in discourse. We look at the line-up with a childlike fascination… shapes, sizes and iniquities.

If they could speak, what a cacophony! Or chorus. What stories they have told. What trespasses made. 10 would be our friends, 12 a jury, but here we are faced with dozens of them. Enough to feel the relentless nature of the mob, the organisation, the media, and their external messages that affect and propagandise us.

What can contain this impulse for rumour and lies? The consideration of an antithesis to the tongues’ potential for harm generates the creation of tongue covers, like a chastity belt… a preventative measure. Tongue covers- who knew- a fabulous array of completely immoderate constraints that are so beautiful, now we all want one.

And enough on display to indicate the designer line and the basic model. Perhaps some lies are in a higher class than others… Like the ultimate codpiece, they are boastful and slyly ridiculous at the same time.

As Mona has stated, her work often is a “continuation of stories, lots of stories”. The works themselves evolve as each part comes into being and other narrative possibilities are construed and fabricated around them. In Barcelona Two Step, the dance moves are animated by red and personalised by appendages. The arrangements suggest the stories of those who may fit into the shoes and how they relate to each other. There is a reference to the dance patterns that were made into floor posters for instruction.

Again, the antithesis. What about the disabled? Who are prevented from entering the dance by shyness, social stigma, physical limitations? Other ways are provided via inventive prosthetics, equally elegant, forceful and mobile.

The mussels found in many of Mona’s work started to appear from the very beginning of her practice and were a prized object from a childhood on the beach, carefully observed. They are also a favourite shared meal, the remnants of which are a midden of memory, their shelled interiors considered beautiful surfaces.

Clustered barnacles of this dinnertime detritus reappear in the studio where they are hung from the ceiling, squirrelled away into pockets, and stuffed into shoes and stockings. For Ryder, each little bivalve provides evidence of a life once lived, an undocumented memory to be told and retold, caught and lost in repeated tides. (Cassandra Lehman, MAMA catalogue, 2016)

In Dance Me to the End of Night, the mussel shells take on an opulence with the interiors facing outwards and a massive chandelier, which elevates the humble shell to a monumental status. The tribute would not be complete except on the scale we experience- the grandest ballroom would house such a chandelier- this is no domestic dining room, even if this is where they sprang from.

As part of a panorama installation, the shells contribute a suggested grandiose setting and an intimate encounter, as the audience moves around the space and is permitted a close view of each strand of shells. Delight is in the detail as well as the realisation of the material effort involved, as in anything this elaborate and bespoke.

We see the encrusted nature of mussels in Lone Star, with the shells’ exteriors literally covering up what lies beneath. They have intrinsically become the art and design, taking over the frames and objects, and a completely different set of messages has been given. These configurations are ominous and private, shields against whatever is out there.

Back in Mona’s studio, 2020, the mussel possibilities continue, this time looking like some form of exotic wallpaper or ‘green wall’. Other objects and sculptural works are re-visited and re-assembled, with the surrounding shells defining the entire space. Eerie, but cosy. The ongoing crucible of creativity. Strategies of how to express ideas that are clear, but not simplistic, intelligent and critical without condescension, is a peculiar one for the artist, who works in a context that is more evocative than quantified, yet quantity is always present.

One aspect of quantity for Mona is to consider each iteration and take it in many directions, variations on a theme, such as the shoes that tell stories of Dance Me to the End of Night. Another aspect of quantity is to consider possibilities of antithesis, as in Barcelona Two Step; what of those who cannot dance, through disablement from without or within. Expanding possibilities and then paring back until too much becomes sufficient. Abundance characterises the particular creative ability that Mona has as an artist, seen in the labour-intensive, masses of hand-dyed stockings and millions of stitches, middens of mussels and piles of shoes. Accompanied by the rich associations found in the icons of her practice, Mona Ryder has revealed a complex and astonishing legacy.